US: Black Footballers Strike Until "Racist" President Resigns
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The football team of the University of Missouri is on strike until the resignation of its university president, who failed to respond to incidents of on-campus racism, severed relations with Planned Parenthood and stripped funding for graduate students.
The athletes, most of them Black, showed their solidarity on Sunday with Jonathan Butler, a graduate student who started a hunger strike last Monday for the same cause, tweeting that, “injustice anywhere is a threat to Justice Everywhere.”
The campus group leading the activism against President Tim Wolfe, Concerned Student 1950, has demanded that he “acknowledge his white male privilege, recognize that systems of oppression exist, and provide a verbal commitment to fulfilling Concerned Student 1–9–5–0 demands,” Venezuela-based TeleSUR reported on Sunday.
The group blocked Wolfe's car during homecoming, protesting his lack of response to two incidents of students calling campus leaders racial slurs. Their list of demands criticized Wolfe for “allowing his driver to hit one of the demostrators, consenting to the physical violence of bystanders, and Leslie refusing to intervene when Columbia Police Department used excessive force with demonstrators.” Three days after Concerned Student 1950 published the list, a student smeared feces in the form of a swastika on a bathroom wall.
Wolfe met with the Legion of Black Collegians, Concerned Student 1950 and Butler but has still not stepped down. Instead, he released a formal apology, required online diversity training, allowed for limited work with Planned Parenthood and restored the tuition waivers and health subsidies he had taken from graduate students at the beginning of the year. He wrote in a statement on Sunday that Butler's “voice for social justice is important and powerful.”
Still, students expressed skepticism about the diversity training—the school has a non-white population of about 17 percent—and occupied a quad at the Columbia campus on Monday echoing Butler's demand. Concerned Student 1950 launched a boycott of school services the next day.
This week, two dozen professors from the English department gave a no confident vote to the chancellor of the University of Missouri system, which includes campuses in St. Louis, Columbia, Kansas City and Rolla.